A team of researchers from Bangor University in the UK believes that they can create broadband speeds about 2000 times faster than we have today without a massive increase in costs. The team has managed to reach speeds of 20 GB of data downloaded every second. With that data throughput, you could download a full-length HD movie in about 10 seconds.

The team is now involved in a three-year project with the goal of making the technology commercially viable. The technology the researchers have developed uses fiber-optic cable. The problem with fiber-optic networks is that as the length of the cable increases, errors become more common in an effect known as dispersion.

While many in the industry have been investigating simply adding more physical fiber-optic strands inside cables to allow for the carrying of more data, increasing the size of fiber-optic cable gets expensive.

"The trouble is, that can all cost a lot of money," said Dr Roger Giddings, one of the team running the Ocean project in north Wales. "So the focus for the Ocean project is really to find out if we can do it in a cost-effective way, and is it a viable way of doing it in a commercial setting?

The method the researchers have devised to be able to send more data without introducing errors down a fiber-optic strand is called Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing, or OOFDM. The key breakthrough in the technology was the development of a piece of electronics that can encode and decode optical signals on the fly.

So far, the team has been able to reach data speeds of 20 Gb per second, but they believe they can reach speeds as high as 40 Gb per second. The team of researchers is also working with major industry partners, including Fujitsu, the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Finisar Israel, and VPIsystems.

At least at the moment, this is for backbones. Note all the discussion of current optical fiber and long distances? 10 Gb/s fiber is common, 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s are coming, though this may be a different way of handling it.